The use of identification devices, such as radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, is becoming increasingly prevalent for monitoring the transportation and storage of goods and items. Some retailers are now beginning to insist on the use of such devices for monitoring the movement of goods including perishable goods.
With present systems, in order to obtain information about an RFID tag that has been read, it is necessary to access an electronic product code (EPC) Information Service. Assuming the location of that Information Service is not known a priori then it is discovered by using an EPC Object Naming Service to gain the address of the Information Service. A problem with this approach is that if the Object Naming Service fails there is no way of obtaining the address of the Information Service. Also, someone has to pay the cost of maintaining the centralized Object Naming Service.
In order for the EPC Information Service to work efficiently, the result of the address lookup should be cached locally. However, a problem with such an arrangement is that it is only possible if the address of the Information Service is static and is consistent across a number of individual tags.